Critical Essay by Sally-Ann Kitts

In the following essay, Kitts discusses a 1792 review of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in a Spanish periodical that was very favorable but which played down the work's more revolutionary aspects.

Those familiar with Mary Wollstonecraft's radical feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, may be surprised to discover that it received a lengthy and favourable review in a periodical published in the reactionary Spain of 1792. Following the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, the government of Charles IV, headed by the Count of Floridablanca, had taken increasingly severe measures to curb the spread of revolutionary ideas from France, a country which had exerted a great...